Hundreds of Florida adopted babies had their birth records falsified. This is one who found her family

A mysterious Miami doctor, a secret birth, a furtive adoption and a lifetime of wondering where she came from and why she was given up. Amy Ram loved the parents who raised her, but she never stopped wanting answers. This week, she finally found them in a town on the Central Florida coast.

A mysterious Miami doctor, a secret birth, a furtive adoption and a lifetime of wondering where she came from and why she was given up. Amy Ram loved the parents who raised her, but she never stopped wanting answers. This week, she finally found them in a town on the Central Florida coast.

On this brisk late-November day, Ram, 58, was finally meeting the birth family she had spent decades hoping to find. The questions that had troubled her since childhood began to spill out.

Like hundreds of others born in Miami from the 1930s to the 1960s, Ram is a Cole baby, named after the doctor who delivered her. Katherine M. Cole practiced out of her two-story South Florida home, performing abortions before they were legal and arranging for the adoption of more than 1,000 babies, mostly from unwed mothers. For her services, she charged adoptive parents as much as $2,000 in ethically questionable fees.

Some regard her as a hero for helping desperate, frightened women who had few options. Others say she played God. But whatever history thinks of Cole, who died in 1981, her great sin may have been this: She falsified the babies’ birth records.

For reasons that aren’t clear, Cole invented birth dates. She routinely listed the adoptive parents on the birth certificates. And before the popularity of ancestry DNA tests, she made it all but impossible for the children to later track down their genealogical roots.

Ram first tried some 30 years ago.

“I looked at my birth certificate, and I saw there was a name there — Katherine M. Cole — and an address,” she says. “I thought, ‘Who is this lady and what is this address?’ My cousin was helping me, and we found out there was a Cole baby registry. I found out my birthday wasn’t even my real birthday, and I remember being very upset by that.”

She hired a detective agency — the best her well-to-do adoptive family could afford. But ultimately the investigators came up empty-handed.

“Sorry,” they said. “It’s a dead end.” Amy Ram, then in her 20s, told herself to forget about it.

Sarah Espedido / Orlando Sentinel

Judy Steinberg, meets the biological family of her adopted daughter for the first time. Thursday, November 29, 2018.

Judy Steinberg, meets the biological family of her adopted daughter for the first time. Thursday, November 29, 2018. (Sarah Espedido / Orlando Sentinel)

Judy Steinberg had always been honest with her daughter about the adoption. When Amy was barely old enough to read, Steinberg and her husband, Joe, had given her a book about a family of chickens that couldn’t take care of their newly hatched chick, so they turned to another family to help.

“Just like you,” they said.

The Steinbergs — a couple from Long Island — had heard through a network of pediatricians about a baby girl in Miami available for adoption. The couple hired an adoption attorney and Judy flew to Florida with her mother.

“I don’t know anything about babies,” Judy Steinberg says now. “So my mother and the lawyer and I come down to Miami and we go to a hotel near the airport, and a woman brings Amy in. She was a gorgeous baby.”

Judy never met Cole, never checked the birth date on the paperwork and, if money changed hands, it was only to pay the lawyer. She was told the baby had been born only a couple of weeks earlier, though from photos viewed in hindsight it was likely that the child was already several months old.

By all accounts, Amy had a happy, stable childhood. An adopted brother came along after three years through a doctor in Brooklyn.

On occasions when she and her brother were sent to their rooms for discipline, he would climb out the window to go play with his friends. But Amy, shy and sensitive, would stay and straighten her toys, neatly lining up the dolls on her bed and hoping she wouldn’t be given away — again — because she was too much trouble.

She would go on to have a good education, a successful career as a designer and art teacher, an eventual marriage, four children and a wide circle of friends. She would move from Long Island to Rhode Island to Manhattan to Los Angeles. But she always had one question following her, nagging: Why didn’t her birth mother want her?

Then in May, her oldest son, Oren, died unexpectedly of heart failure at age 31. The small hole in her soul widened to a gaping chasm.

“I had to do something,” says her daughter, Shelley Ram, now 31 herself. “I thought, “How can I help her? And the only thing I could think that would really be helpful was to find her birth family.”

Shelley Ram, too, had searched before with no luck. She had her own questions about ancestry and genetic health issues. She had signed up for DNA testing through 23AndMe and later Ancestry.com. She had even found a distant cousin. But neither knew whether it was the cousin’s mother or father who linked them. Shelley called a suspected relative in Canada who hung up on her — then blocked her on his phone and social media.

But she was determined. She found the name of a “search angel” — a woman who volunteered to sort through DNA sites, historical data and newspaper clippings to reconstruct families. The woman agreed to help.

“She’s like a magician,” Shelley Ram says. “It’s like hocus pocus to me.” The search angel found the Smiths of Florida.

Sarah Espedido / Orlando Sentinel

Amy Ram looks through the pages of the Smith family album.

Amy Ram looks through the pages of the Smith family album. (Sarah Espedido / Orlando Sentinel)

Sarah Espedido / Orlando Sentinel

Don Smith, Amy Ram's second cousin, presents his graphic representation of the family tree.

Their name may be common, but the Smiths’ devotion to family history is not. In Connie Bach’s Ponce Inlet home, an entire room is devoted to it. Photos of the family patriarch, her great-grandfather C.W. Smith, line the walls alongside pictures of aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, nieces and nephews.

Bach’s niece, Patti Booton, “the family historian,” had started tracing the extended family tree 12 years earlier, and she had signed herself and her mother up on Ancestry.com. That allowed Shelley Ram’s search angel to find a match — Booton’s mother, Carole Page, who lives a couple of blocks from Connie Bach, her sister. Shelley sent an email: My mother might be related to you.

“Patti called me and I went crazy,” Page says. “So then I called my cousins down in South Florida and said, ‘Listen to this!’ And I got back to Shelley right away, and I said we were absolutely thrilled. But at the time, nobody knew who the mom was. So we were all trying to figure it out. There were little whisperings, ‘Did anybody see anybody pregnant?’ And, ‘Who would have let this little girl go?’”

It took four months to piece things together: One of Page and Bach’s cousins, Jenny-Lou Middlemas, the daughter of a Miami beauty queen, had divorced and was living in Miami with her two sons. At 34, she apparently had an affair with her landlord and became pregnant. She sent her boys to live with relatives and later told everyone she’d lost the baby.

In truth, on a fall day in 1960, Jenny-Lou gave birth to a healthy little girl she turned over to Dr. Cole.And after that, the rest of Jenny-Lou’s family fractured. She never took the boys back, and they lost touch with most of their other relatives. Only on his deathbed did their father — Jenny-Lou’s ex-husband — reveal the secret:

Your mother had a daughter she gave up for adoption.

Jenny-Lou died in 1978 at age 51. Her landlord lover was murdered about the same time.

“My mother gave me the greatest gift by giving me up,” Amy Ram says now. “I don’t know what kind of person I would have been if she hadn’t.”

It turned out the Smiths didn’t just want to meet Amy, they wanted to meet her children and her adoptive mother and brother. Shelley booked flights to Florida for the week after Thanksgiving.

The first day, they met Amy’s half-brothers, now 73 and 64, for lunch at that rum bar and grill. The men had rarely seen each other over the years, let alone the extended family, and felt uncomfortable joining in the gathering held the following day at Connie and Harvey Bach’s home in Ponce Inlet. There, a big banner was tied across the front porch railing: Welcome to Amy’s First Smith Family Reunion.

At least 25 relatives came from both ends of Florida, New York and Texas — some of whom hadn’t seen each other since childhood. They had to wear name tags to keep everyone straight.

They presented Amy with a ribbon-wrapped album of historical family photos and newspaper clippings that had taken days to assemble. Page had bought sterling silver bracelets engraved with an image of a tree and the words: “One family, A Lot of Hearts.” She gave them to Amy and Shelley and Judy Steinberg.

“I feel like your [birth] mom was God’s vessel in getting you to Judy Steinberg,” Page told Amy. “This all makes sense to me. It was God’s order that you go to Judy.”

Amy nodded, and the two women hugged.

Once, in her nightmares, Amy Ram had imagined that if she ever found her birth family, they would recoil. “Why did you come here?” they would demand. “No one is supposed to know about you!”

She knows it has happened to other Cole babies.

Instead, the Smith Family Reunion lasted eight hours that day, and most of them met again the next. Then they gathered for breakfast the following morning, before Amy and Shelley flew home to California. They talked about a second reunion next year. And they all lined up for a group photo for the family holiday card.

“I can see the change in my mother,” Shelley Ram would say afterward. “It has brought her life. It has brought her confidence. It has given her perspective. I think it has helped my mother heal.”